I'll dispense quickly with the technical details: The most important thing to know about a chip is that the more transistors you have, the more calculations can be done at once. And the number of transistors on a chip is naturally limited by the size of each individual transistor. And the size of them has gotten smaller as more and more transistors have been stuffed onto microprocessors over the years—all in an attempt to keep pace with the dictates of Moore's Law. (Refresher course: Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit doubled every two years, and the engineers who were the unfortunate recipients of this received wisdom have been forced to live up to it ever since.)

But now they've gotten so small that the silicon dioxide insulators on each gate, or transistor gate, are only five atoms thick. Making these gates any smaller would allow leakage of current across the gate, wasting power and making the chip hotter and less efficient. The solution was to use a new material as an insulator, and the result is a new 45nm high-k insulator that replaces the previous 65nm version.

Okay, okay, so what does this mean? I spoke with Kaizad Mistry, Intel's director of logic technology integration and one of the presenters of Intel's research. "The significance of using high-k metal gates in our 45nm technology is that a barrier to the progression of Moore's Law has been overcome," he says. "So what the consumer can expect is that chips will continue to get smaller, consume less power, have more computing potential, your batteries last longer, and so on." Mistry claims a 30 percent reduction in power draw during switching or a 20 percent increase in performance. In other words, you can run Penryn chips fast, or you can run them very efficient, depending on the application.

But there's more. Intel envisions Penryn going into a new class of "mobile Internet devices" under a project code named Silverthorne by mid-2008. "The low power of 45nm allows us to take the full functionality of Intel architecture and a Windows OS down into the handheld space," Mistry says. Will that mean the second coming of the Ultra Mobile PC, which has thus far been greeted with a yawn? Or is it a Wintel answer to Google's Android and Apple's iPhone? It's hard to tell. At this point, it's just a chip. —Glenn Derene